Interstellceptmento

May 27, 2015 .... or is it? BWAH

Let me start by saying that I enjoyed
Intersetllar quite a bit. I'd give it 4 thumbs on my 5 thumb-scale
(don't ask where I got the other three thumbs). It was entertaining,
I didn't hate it. But there were some issues... And of course
SPOILERS:

The premise doesn't really make
sense. Thanks to Coop, they figure out gravity manipulation, launch
enormous city-sized spaceships that can traverse worm holes. BUT
they can't figure out how to grow Okra on Earth? This flaw is
present in every “find a new home” save-humanity movie. If you
have the ability to move thousands or millions of people off world,
if you can traverse worm-holes, if you can figure out how to survive
on some new alien world that's different from Earth, if you can
terraform another planet...then you can make it work on Earth. If
you can make plants grow on Alien World 7, with different soil
chemistry, different lightning conditions, different seasons, a
complete lack of insects and all the intricacies of agriculture that
are present on Earth...why can't you figure out how to grow wheat
back on Earth? Interstellar only explains it by saying that there's
a “blight.” Which doesn't really make sense because when they
move off Earth, how are they going to make sure they don't take the
blight with them? If it's infecting all plants everywhere, why do we
assume it can't get into their escape colony? They don't seem super
strict about contamination when they let random farmer Coop show up
at NASA's Ark headquarters and they just let him waltz in with
Blight all over him. It seems like it would be easier to stop a
viral plant fungus than to figure out wormhole manipulation. Then
again, a movie about a man inventing a vaccine for plants might not
be all that exciting.

They have no MRI machines left on
the planet. But they have wormhole-hopping super spaceships and
joke-cracking AI robots. So why can't they make MRIs?

Let's fucking walk everywhere...IN SPACE!

They send Coop and the gang
through a wormhole near Saturn and then they go visit a black-hole
and three alien planets...yet when they get to a planet, they have
to walk long distances with no other method of travel. They couldn't
bring along a rover like they did on mythical Apollo missions. That
would be too hard, wasn't enough room in their ship for a tiny
rover. Hell, send a segway. Coop and Matt Damon end up treking
across ice for long distances. Anne Hathaway causes everyone to age
23 years because she slowly trawdles through ankle deep water.
Seriously people, you've got interstellar spaceships and walking and
nothing in between? A plastic kayak weighing four pounds could have
prevented half the problems in the movie.

NASA needs a random farmer to be
their savior for this mission that's just about to launch? Why? They
mention that they don't have any astronauts left that have left a
simulator. But remember, they just sent a bunch of people to a whole
host of alien planets just 10 years ago. They forgot how to go to
space in the meantime. Don't have the budget? In any case, wouldn't
you rather send someone that's been training for this for a decade
instead of a farmer that wandered in covered in blight talking about
ghosts? They could explain this away, maybe explain that humanity is
down to such a low population that they've actually tapped out the
talented pilots or something. But as it is, it seems totally absurd
that Coop is suddenly the savior. And what happened to the guy who
was going to be the savior pilot? He just gets bumped from the
flight and sits on his ass for 50 years?

See, big fucking rocket!

Remember when they launch from
Earth? There's a massive Saturn V-ish looking rocket, and it
launches just this small shuttle like spacecraft into Earth orbit.
From there, they dock to the bigger interstellar ship, they head off
to Saturn, then wormhole. Then they take the small shuttle-like-ship
down to a planet that has 130% of Earth's gravity. Then they do some
surfing, then take off and fly away. Recall that getting from Earth
to Earth Orbit required a Saturn V-ish massive rocket? Well now
leaving a planet with 30% stronger gravity requires no such rocket,
they just fly away. I'm sorry, what? This makes no fucking sense. If
this spaceship is capable of just flying off a planet with stronger
gravity than Earth, then it should be capable of just flying into
space from Earth. And if you have the technology to build small
ships that can just fly up to Earth orbit, then you don't need
massive Saturn V rockets and you don't need gravity manipulation
technology in order to put a lot of shit into space. You guys have
the technology to easily get into space. Because remember, after
they take-off from 130%-gravity world, which is a manuever that
should be more difficult than launching to orbit from Earth, they
then head off to another planet, then take off from that planet.
They've got a ship that can launch into orbit from two planets one
after another...but it can't get to Earth orbit without a Saturn V?
This might sound like a nit-pick to you, but to someone that knows
anything about rockets, this is like mind-numbingly stupid. They
obviously tried to make the movie somewhat realistic when it comes
to depicting black holes and relativity, but they wave a wand and
hope you can't think about 1960s technology?

Let's walks some more.

So you arrive through a wormhole,
you have 3 planets to check out. It seems like they don't know shit
about the planets other than knowing that the explorer has given
them a thumbs up. Not sure why they can't just look at the planet
now and do spectral analysis or even receive more detailed info from
the explorers that could tell them that this planet is covered in a
giant rolling tsunami. But whatever, assume they can't get more info
and have to actually land on a planet and check it out (apparently
just orbiting it and looking at it with their eyes isn't an option
either?). Fine, so then which of the following planets do you pick?
Two planets that are basically normal...or a third planet that's so
close to a black hole that 1 hour on the surface is like 7 years on
Earth? Let's go check out the crazy time-dilated world first!
Remember that they sent explorers out a decade ago to check out the
planets? Well the explorer that landed on Tsunami-World just landed
there like 80 minutes ago. The explorers that landed at the other
two planets are still broadcasting thumbs-ups after a decade. Which
is more likely to be habitable, a planet that has supported a signal
beacon for 10 years, or one that has supported such a beacon for 80
minutes? Why in the hell would you check out that crazy time-dilated
planet first? Even if you get there and it's a great world and
humans go settle there...they will always be dealing with crazy time
dilation from being so near a black-hole. Does that sound like a
nice stable place you want to make home? That'd be like deciding of
all places to live on Earth, a trailer-park in Oklahoma is the best
bet for survival.

Hurr durr, I'm an astronaut.

I hate Anne Hathaway. Oh my god,
shut up. You are so annoying. All you do is cry and screw things up,
then blabber on about love.

You made a sort of believable
story about worm-holes and warping space-time...and then you crammed
in the idea that love is an actual super-natural force that
transcends space-time, but not just any love, father-daughter love?
A. It's corny as fuck. B. You don't need to tack on something
super-natural like love being an undiscovered aspect of physics like
it's the god damn Higgs Boson. It just makes people roll their eyes
and try to ignore that Anne Hathaway was in the movie. Let their
love speak for itself.

If you want to make a movie that's
like 2001 A Space Odyssey, why do you edit it like it's a music
video? 2001 is full of incredibly long shots of beautiful space
things with no dialogue and sometimes no music. It gives the
audience space and time to think about what's happening, to live
inside their own heads for a moment and wrap their heads around
what's going on. While I think 2001 does this too much and could
have done with a good trim, it still stands that one of the reasons
2001 is good is that it is not in your face and it gives you time to
think. This movie throws three times as much information at you, but
before you can think about it, it then slams you with a plot twist
followed by a bunch of crappy dialogue. For example, any
space-travel sequence is filled with non-sense pilot chatter. “Full
reverse thrusters” “On my mark, 3, 2, 1” “Match the spin
now.” A. Pilots don't narrate what they are doing. B. It's not
even necessary, it's not like the audience would be totally lost if
Coop doesn't explain what he's doing. C. Imagine instead that these
sequences don't involve rapid cuts and shitty fake-pilot dialogue,
and instead consist of long shots and no dialogue that let you just
appreciate the visuals and have some space to think. I think you get
more tension from silence than you do from random fake pilot speak.
Also, for all the pretty visuals, they sure like to cram in as many
cuts as possible. No, stop looking at the wormhole, instead, look at
Anne Hathaway passing out and then a close up of the ship exterior,
now back to Coop, now back to Hathaway, now back to the exterior.
How about an iconic long shot as they traverse a worm hole that
doesn't cut away from the pretty visuals? And it's not just a
problem with space travel. They also cram in random shit throughout
the whole movie. Clips from the future of people talking about dust
storms, let's just cram that in to the beginning. This movie is
nearly 3 hours long, yet it can't ever find more than 15 seconds to
let you think without hitting you over the head with corny dialogue
about love or stupid fake pilot speak or a random plot twist. It's almost like Nolan is
afraid that if a scene takes more than 40 seconds we'll get bored. You make so-called philosophical movies that make you think,
but apparently the thinking is homework for when the movie is over.

Astronauts cry a lot right?

The ending sucks. So Coop makes it
out of the black hole alive, is recovered floating in space, then
meets Murph as a grandma, but just for about 30 seconds before she
tells him to leave (cause the audience is bored already, it's been
30 whole seconds). Then he steals a spaceship and heads to Anne
Hathaway because she was the only woman in the movie he's allowed to
have sex with so he has to go to her now or something. So, they
choose to have Cooper live through a black-hole only to have this
not really pay off. Sure he meets Murph again, but she tells him to
leave almost immediately and she dies. Was that worth it? Then he
goes to Anne Hathaway...who is still alone on that planet for some
reason? They've launched massive city-sized ships, but they couldn't
send a single shuttle with like 4 people to go help Anne Hathaway?
They even send for grandma Murph to come out to Saturn and meet
Cooper, and they have a hangar full of ships...so they're heading to
the new home for humanity, but haven't bothered to send anyone to
help the single individual woman who is on the planet by herself
getting it ready? Why? It's not even a plot hole because the fact
that she's alone doesn't really matter for anything anyway. Why do
we make such a leap, that Cooper lives through the black hole and is
recovered, only to have such an unsatisfying ending?

Here's
how I would end the movie instead:

Remember how Cooper could
move her books on the bookshelf? Then at the climax, as she's
figuring out that he's the ghost...she starts moving books. I
thought she was going to communicate with him inside the black hole
by writing something in morse code by moving her books. And he could
respond, since he can see into that room. Right? They could have
communicated back and forth. How's that for an ending? She can't see
him, but he can see here, and they communicate with morse code by
moving books around, they both cry tears of joy, he then gives her
the data. Since he's inside the black-hole, time moves really
slowly, almost a stand-still, so he doesn't' die, he's just left in
the black hole forever living in that moment. Meanwhile outside the
blackhole it just looks like the black hole disappears along with
Cooper. He's gone. But to him, time was passing so slowly that he's
in there basically for an infinite amount of time living in the
moment where he talks to Murph. Then we glimpse her figuring out
gravity manipulation and then we see the giant ships leaving earth.
The end.